In the 20 years since its inception, open source has turned out to be the most successful model for building software. The world today runs on open-source software (OSS). An ecosystem has been created around OSS. Businesses and software builders use OSS directly or indirectly, while others offer services and products based on OSS.

OSS is perceived as being free, fair and/or ethical. This perception, however, may not be entirely true. That may be counter-intuitive, but it’s at the heart of the debate around OSS. As OSS is growing up, it’s becoming more successful, more complex, and ubiquitous. It seems we are entering a new phase for OSS, and it’s not without growing pains.

Commercial OSS in the cloud

The four essential freedoms are a cornerstone of OSS. They refer to what users can do with the software, but they tell us nothing about the economic cost, or benefit, related to the software. OSS is free as in speech, but not free as in beer. Someone has to build the software, and then someone has to maintain, run, and manage it.

As far as the perception of OSS being fair or ethical goes: it’s just that – a perception. The perception stems from the OSS community ethos, but in reality, the OSS freedoms are at odds with notions of fair or ethical use. Anyone can contribute as much or as little as they please to OSS. Anyone can use OSS for any purpose, regardless of contribution.

This has led to where we are today. Cloud vendors like AWS, Google or Microsoft, have built their infrastructure based on OSS. Each of them also contributes to OSS in many ways, including code and outreach for existing OSS projects, as well as establishing new OSS projects. But use of, or contribution to, each OSS project is not really accounted for.

Recently, the Apache Software Foundation, one of the key OSS institutions, celebrated its 20th anniversary. The ASF claims the value of the software under its auspices is around $20 Billion, by its own estimates. Everyone is entitled to use the software for free, and many do. But the ones who create this value are the ones who contribute to OSS, be it in code or in other ways.

As analyses have shown, many OSS contributors do this because they are intrinsically motivated: the software is interesting to them, they need it, or they feel good about their contribution. In that respect, they are not much different from vendors that have chosen to build OSS products. Those vendors have invested in their OSS, and their ROI depends on it.

Which brings us to cloud vendors. As many pundits note, cloud vendors operate on a whole different plane. If commercial OSS vendors are about taking innovation from 0 to 1, cloud vendors are about taking it from 1 to n. This brings value in and by itself. Cloud vendors also release OSS projects of their own, and contribute to existing ones. Their strategies, however, differ, and this is where things get complicated.

AWS is the leader in the cloud market. The strategy AWS has adopted with regards to OSS, however, has exposed it to criticism. Recently, an independent data-driven analysis was done on GitHub, where OSS code lives. The analysis showed that in terms of code, AWS does not seem to be contributing much to the development of the OSS products it offers as a service.

It’s understandable why vendors building those products are looking to tweak their licenses to disallow AWS from running their software as a service. It’s also understandable why the OSI, which has control over OSS licenses, is pushing back: by introducing those tweaks, the software is no longer OSS.

If this was just a clash of commercial interests, we might be getting our pop corn to watch. But for something with such high value to society at large as OSS, the ramifications are important. Is there a way everyone involved can get a fair share of the profit, and keep contributing to OSS? Let’s hear what 2 CEOs from vendors who build OSS, and work with AWS, have to say.

The co-opetition view: one big act vs. many small ones

Dor Laor is the founder and CEO of ScyllaDB, an OSS vendor with an interesting story. ScyllaDB was built on a contentious premise, as it is a re-implementation of another OSS database: Apache Cassandra. Laor has shared thoughts on OSS license changes, as well as Amazon’s latest move to offer Cassandra as a managed service on AWS cloud.

Our discussion started touching upon ScyllaDB’s latest features. According to Laor, these features (most prominently lightweight transactions) do not just bring parity with Cassandra, but go one step further. Laor expanded on the technical aspects of ScyllaDB’s solution. As these seemed technically sound, yet conceptually simple, the discussion moved to a broader topic.

Laor claimed none of ScyllaDB’s closest matches, namely Apache Cassandra and AWS DynamoDB, have such features. When asked why he thinks that is, given the nature of those features, Laor offered 2 answers.

For Cassandra, he mentioned that for the last few years its former main contributor, namely DataStax, has taken a step back. Naturally, this has stalled Cassandra’s development considerably. As for AWS, Laor noted that AWS has the tendency to offer products that are good enough, but not necessarily the best in their league.

As ScyllaDB is also available on AWS, and Laor was present at AWS’s main event, re:Invent, in 2019, he offered a metaphor to explain this. Laor said there were a number of stages set up for various acts in the re:Invent after party, and he found all of them mediocre. Laor went on to add that he sees that as a metaphor for AWS’ philosophy of going wide, rather than deep in its undertakings. This is a point shared in other OSS vendor strategies, too.

But ScyllaDB went beyond that, to do something no other OSS vendor we know of has done before: offer a compatibility layer for one of AWS’ products, namely DynamoDB. ScyllaDB’s DynamoDB API support will be officially available soon, and it will enable DynamoDB users to migrate to ScyllaDB. Laor said there is a waiting list for this.

This is technically feasible, and legally permissible. Unless things change, there are no restrictions on using APIs, as per the famous Oracle vs. Google case verdict. While some of AWS’ own people questioned this move, Laor claimed users are better off using ScyllaDB. In turn, this opens up some interesting questions. What about ethics, and contribution?

Building a new implementation of an existing API seems cleaner than using someone else’s implementation, but it still means benefiting from a userbase others built. Laor acknowledged that, as well as the fact that ScyllaDB leverages contributions from Amazon, Cassandra, and DataStax. He also pointed out that this spurs innovation and benefits users, and measuring contribution is very hard.

ScyllaDB has an open core strategy. Some features are proprietary, while the OSS core is licensed under AGPL, which Laor said AWS avoids. So far this has worked in deterring AWS from offering ScyllaDB as a service, although it could also be that ScyllaDB has not reached critical mass yet. In any case, as Laor said, these things change.

The collaboration view: balancing OSS makers and takers

Most OSS products fall under one of two categories. Many products are largely driven by a single vendor, whose employees contribute most of the related effort and drive its directions. Other products leverage contributions that cross-cut organizations who employ the contributors; often, OSS work is the main activity for such contributors.

But there is an OSS product in which the vendor commercializing it only contributes 5% of its code while still being the largest contributor. The product is commercially successful, has a community-driven decision making process, and is a distinguished AWS partner, too. And these are not the only reasons why Acquia, the vendor commercializing the Drupal CMS, and Dries Buytaert, its founder, stand out.

Recently, Buytaert shared his thoughts on balancing OSS makers and takers in an elaborate blog post. In our discussion, Buytaert confessed it took him a couple of weeks to put his post together. This is understandable, considering how many aspects of OSS it touches upon.

Drupal started in 2000, while Acquia was founded in 2007. As Buytaert highlighted, Acquia and the Drupal community have a unique relationship, which is formally documented in a charter. The community includes about 80.000 contributors, while Aquia employs about 1.000 people.

Yet, Drupal’s governance is not with Acquia. The community sets Drupal’s roadmap, and elects people in leadership roles. People choose to contribute to areas that matter most to them, and Acquia does this, too. Buytaert said that even when there is a decision Acquia does not agree with, the decision is carried through, if there is substantial backing for it.

Buytaert builds on the notion of OSS as part of the Commons, introducing an important distinction. For end users, OSS projects are public goods; the shared resource is the software. But for OSS companies, OSS projects are common goods; the shared resource is the (potential) customer. Makers invest heavily in the software, takers are mostly interested in customers.

Buytaert, leveraging Elinor Ostrom’s work in addition to his own experience, seems to have gotten to the heart of the issue. Research shows that when the Commons are left unchecked, without governance or rules for contribution, they collapse: shared resources are either engulfed or exhausted.

Organizations like the ASF and the OSI have done a good job in making OSS successful. But now that OSS is successful, without a mechanism for fair reward in place, we have no reason to believe OSS will not have the fate of Commons that preceded it. This is why we wondered whether the OSI should perhaps reconsider. Apparently, we are not the only ones, and the OSI seems to be listening.

Ethical software

First off, there seems to be an ongoing debate within the OSI itself as to what should constitute an OSS license today. This goes to show that what worked 20 years ago is not necessarily what works today. In addition, more and more people seem to be realizing the OSS conundrum, and are sharing ideas to move forward. Buytaert, on his part, offers 3 concrete proposals.

One, don’t just appeal to organizations’ self-interest, but also to their fairness principles. Two, encourage end users to offer selective benefits to Makers. Three, experiment with new licenses. Those points were also backed by Laor, who prompted users to consciously vet their OSS providers for fairness, and pointed to precedents like the Open Invention Network.

One thing is clear: AWS should not be excluded, it’s a vital part of the OSS ecosystem. The fact that this is a complex ecosystem with many actors that need to strike a balance is something many people agree on. This includes Buytaert, Laor, and AWS VP/Distinguished Engineer Matthew Wilson, a self-proclaimed “OSS romantic”, to name but a few.

Buytaert also agreed with Laor that while AWS is a good partner to have, if it decided to start offering ScyllaDB or Drupal as a managed service on its own, there would be nothing they could do to stop it. Buytaert was also clear on something else: making OSS sustainable may require a break with OSS as we know it. But if that’s what it takes, so be it.

This also seems to be the gist of Wilson’s position as stated in a number of Twitter threads: this is how OSS works. If you are not happy with it, do it differently – just don’t call it OSS. This is a fair point, made by others, too. Recently Stephen Walli, principal program manager on the Azure engineering team at Microsoft and an OSS veteran, shared his ideas on Software Freedom in a Post Open Source World.

Walli went through the history of OSS, the four essential freedoms, and the ways and reasons people challenge how OSS works. Walli’s message is along similar lines: “I am happy for people to challenge the ideas that define our software collaborations and culture of outbound sharing. But I want them to be bold. If you want to define a new movement then do so.”

Some people call it Commercial OSS, others Cloud Native OSS. Either way, it’s not just commercial interests that question how OSS works today. It’s also people concerned about the ethical implications of OSS. Although it could be argued that fairness touches upon ethics too, Coraline Ada Ehmke and the Ethical Source Movement (ESM) have a somewhat different angle.

Ehmke, who founded the ESM, is a software engineer, a public speaker, and has been an active OSS participant since the early 2000s. Ehmke, who previously stated that “OSI and FSF are not the real arbiters of what is Open Source and what is Free Software” is now running for the board of directors of the OSI, and the OSI’s VP seems open to engaging with her. The ESM states:

“Today, the same OSS that enriches the commons and powers innovation also plays a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racist policing, the deployment of cruel and inhumane weapons, and other human rights abuses all over the world.

We want to do something about this misuse of our software. But as developers we don’t seem to have any recourse, no way to prevent our work from being used to harm others. We want to change that”.

Fair software

The definition of Ethical Software breaks with the four essential freedoms of OSS, creating licenses such as the Hippocratic or the Atmosphere Licenses. This raises questions, including how to enforce such licenses. Though a definite answer is not readily available, for the time being the thinking seems to be that fear of exposure of illegal use should work on a first level. People seem sympathetic to the notion.

Ethical software licenses are not the only OSS variant around, however. There is also the Fair Source License, allowing users to view, download, execute, and modify code free of charge. Up to a certain number of users from an organization can use the code for free, too. After an organization hits that user limit, it will start paying a licensing fee determined by the software publisher.

Fair Source was created by Sourcegraph and drafted by Heather Meeker, a prominent OSS lawyer who also drafted the Commons Clause for RedisLabs. Fair Source got featured on Wired, and received praise from GitLab, but it does not look like it got much traction. The reason is probably that as things stand, Fair Source is also not an OSS compatible license.

This all seems to be pointing somewhere: perhaps we’ve reached the limits of what OSS in its current form can do. People are realizing it, and questioning the status quo. Whether that will lead somewhere, remains to be seen. But some first steps are taken, and the potential seems to be there. OSS was a bold step in its time, too, and its pioneers paved the way.

To wrap up, let us revisit the “quantifying OSS contribution is hard, and it’s not only about code” argument. This is true beyond the shadow of a doubt. But before dismissing quantification as mission impossible, we should consider a few things.

Commercial OSS vendors are building platforms to power today’s data-driven economy. As a 3rd party analysis on GitHub data shows, they -expectedly- seem to be key contributors to their own codebases. While there may be communities of practice built around the products, in most cases we would assume vendors do much of the non-code work too – promotion, support etc.

OSS vendors have people who contribute to these tasks in their payrolls. Presumably, these people leave the digital footprint of their work on all sorts of systems. From OSS code repositories to issue trackers, HR, project management tools and spreadsheets, to social media. Nobody should be more motivated or better positioned to develop a holistic, data-driven model for OSS contribution, than commercial OSS vendors.

Doing this would make their claims much more grounded. To be entirely fair, commercial OSS vendors should also apply this to external contributions, be it from individuals or from organizations such as cloud vendors. And to back claims about putting OSS sustainability and the common good first, changing their status to B Corporation to reflect that might help, too.

To get over the OSS midlife crisis, and make software great again, leadership is paramount. There is no doubt the amount of legal, social, software, and data engineering needed to evolve OSS is staggering. But OSS is so important, that it would be irresponsible to shy away from it. Some OSS leaders are showing the way. Opinions may vary, but the issue is being acknowledged. Who would not want to have ethical, fair, open-source software available on demand in the cloud?

This is a chance for everyone to put their data to good use. Amazon, as well as commercial OSS vendors, are leaders, each in their own way. They have great power, which comes with great responsibility. The way other cloud vendors deal with OSS vendors may not be perfect, but it’s a start. We’d like to see that taken to the next level, and involving the entire industry.

Coming up with a way to fix commercial OSS by measuring and rewarding contribution is something that will not just benefit vendors, but the world at large. So if not them, who? If not now, when?

Originally published on Linked Data Orchestration under CC BY-SA 4.0

The post Make software great again: can open source be ethical and fair? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But, how can possibly getting a huge discount be bad? It’s not, if you actually need what you’re buying, and know what you’re buying into. Do you?

Do you know what you’re getting out of that Black Friday deal?

Have you carefully considered your needs and decided a 21″” Plasma TV for the bathroom is going to make your life better? Then by all means, do get it on Black Friday rather than any other day. Do your market research, compare prices and features, track your model of choice and wait for Black Friday to get it. And get it where you can get the best deal — quite likely, Amazon.

That may be a preposterous example, but there’s a reason for seemingly irrational compulsive buying behavior: shopping feels good. It releases dopamine in your brain, a chemical that triggers your reward centers. And if you buy things at discount, the chemical kick is even harder.

It’s just the way our brains our wired, tracing back to our hunter — gatherer history. You may not know or get it, but Amazon sure does. So let’s reframe that question: who would you say is more business-savvy — you or Amazon? At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, we have to go with Amazon here. So why would Amazon give you this kind of deal then, and what do you really get out of it?

Amazing Amazon

You probably know the Amazon story already. What has enabled it to go from a fringe online bookstore in 1994 to one of the most important forces shaping the world in 2017 is a combination of foresight and execution, technology and business acumen.

Amazon has a demonstrated ability to see what the latest technology can do for its business and integrate it faster and better than the competition. Online shopping was just the beginning, after a certain point Amazon has not just been pioneering the fusion of existing technology and business models, but also developing new ones.

Amazon went from selling physical goods online to making goods such as books digital and giving out the medium on which to consume them, building an empire in the process. It also expanded the range of what is sold online and built a vast logistics network to support physical delivery. Today Amazon dominates retail to such an extent that its orders account for up to 15% of international shipping.

Amazon has a huge impact in the world, both digital and physical

All that is not even taking into account Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods, which combined with its -once more- pioneering use of digital technology in the physical realm could mean it will soon dominate not just what lands on your desk but also on your table.

Amazon has also been a force for digital transformation. The cloud, machine learning and product recommendations, voice-activated conversational interfaces — these are just some of the most visible ways in which Amazon and its ilk have pushed technology forward.

Amazon really is amazing. There’s just one problem: the one thing in Amazon’s agenda is Amazon.

That’s not to say that everyone at Amazon is rotten of course — far from it. There are extremely smart people working for Amazon, and some of them are trying to promote commendable causes too. And all this technology makes things better, faster, cheaper for everyone, right?

Black Friday

Do you know where the term Black Friday comes from? It started being used in a different way by employers and workers. As Thanksgiving on Thursdays is a holiday, the temptation to call in sick on Friday and have a 4-day long weekend was just too big. On the other hand, since stores are open on that day, people still go out and shop.

The combination of reduced manpower and increased demand is what made employers start calling this Black Friday, as black had a negative ring to it. Eventually marketing succeeded in making this an iconic day for shopping, so the connotation is not negative anymore. Not if you’re not a worker anyway, which brings us to an interesting point.

This Black Friday, Amazon workers across Europe were be on strike. Furthermore, grass-roots initiatives are calling for demonstrations and boycotts against Amazon., and there is a Greenpeace campaign in progress to make and repair things rather than buying more. Before you get all upset about your order possibly arriving late, it’s worth examining the reasons behind this.

Amazon has been known to push its workers to their limits. This means minimum wage, harsh working conditions and doing everything in its power to keep them from unionizing. That includes offshoring and hiring workers from agencies as temps, even though they may be in fact covering permanent positions. In that respect of course Amazon is not that different from other employers.

Not what most people would think of when talking about Black Friday workers, but there are more connections than you think

You could even argue Amazon sort of has to do this. If others do it and it’s legal, how else will they be able to compete, and why would they not do it? After all, keeping cost down and pushing people to get as many packets as quickly as possible means you can get your order for cheap and on the next day, which is great. It’s great if you’re a consumer and it’s great if you’re Amazon.

So why care about some workers doing low-paid, low-skill jobs? Their jobs will soon be automated anyway, and rightly so. Amazon is already automating its warehouses, meaning things will be done faster and smoother. Less manual effort, less accidents, less people needed, and no strikes too. And even the Mechanical Turks will not be needed soon, these tasks are better done by machines.

But what will the people whose jobs are made redundant do?

Brilliant machines

Of course, it’s not the first time we’re seeing something like this. Before the industrial revolution, most of the population used to work in agriculture, and now only 2% does. There are all sorts of jobs nobody could possibly think of at the time which are now made possible by technology. Technology creates jobs, is the adage.

But who creates technology then? People do, workers do. You would then assume the benefits of technology should all come back to them in a virtuous circle of shorts. Unfortunately that’s not really the case. Even though productivity is rising, which should mean reduced working hours and increased income, this is not happening.

[There] is [a] growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it’s being distributed in terms of wages. If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10.

Laura Tyson, former Chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers

You may argue that there’s the people making these “brilliant machines”, the people doing the low-end jobs, and consumers. We don’t need the low-end jobs, so let’s just retrain these people. Let us all become engineers and data scientists and AI experts, problem solved then, and we can consume happily ever after, right?

Building machines that build machines

Not really. Despite what you may think, engineers and scientists are workers too. Their work may require intellectual rather than physical labor, but at the end of the day, one thing is common: what they produce does not belong to them. It matters not whether you are a cog in a machine or build the machine, as long as you don’t own it. So if we build machines that can do and build more for less, where does that surplus value go?

The best deal ever

If anything, this is the best deal the Amazons of the world, much like the Fords before it, have managed to sell. They have succeeded in riding and pushing the wave of consumerism to disassociate people with the nature of their work to the point where they come to identify themselves as consumers rather than workers.

While it may not be true that Henry Ford started paying workers $5 wages so they could afford his cars, it is true that Amazon pays its workers in part with Amazon vouchers. This is taking an already brilliant scheme to new heights. Workers not only identify as consumers, often turning against other workers, but also keep feeding the machine they build.

So you have raw materials and infrastructure, labor that transforms that into goods and services, and their estimated value. Without labor, there is no value: extracting material and creating infrastructure also takes labor. Yet, the ones putting in the labor get a fraction of that value and zero decision making power in the companies they work for.

But, what about the entrepreneurial spirit of the creators or the Amazons of the world? Surely, their hard work and foresight deserves to be rewarded? As technology and automation progress, menial jobs are becoming obsolete and workers are asked to work not just hard, but smart. To take initiatives, be creative, bold, and entrepreneurial. And workers do that, but in the end that does not make much of a positive difference in their lives.

If data is the new oil, what are the oil rigs?

And what about the brave new world of big data automation? Surely, in this new digital era of innovation there are so many opportunities. All it would take to bring down these monopolies would be disruptive competition, so if we just let the market play its part it will work out in the end — or will it?

If data is the new oil, then the oil rigs for the new data monopolies that are the Amazons of the world are their data-driven products. They have come to dominate and nearly monopolize the web and digital economy to such an extent that if this is not realized and acted upon soon, it may be too late.

Wake up or scramble up

But, sure companies must understand this, right? They must care about their workers, they must have a plan to prevent social unrest, right? How does someone who automates the world’s top organizations answer that question?

“Time flies and technology waits for nobody. I have not met a single CEO, from Deutsche Bank to JP Morgan, who said to me: ‘ok, this will increase our productivity by a huge amount, but it’s going to have social impact — wait, let’s think about it’.

The most important thing right now, what our top minds should be starting to say, is how to move mankind to a higher ground. If people don’t wake up, they’ll have to scramble up — that’s my 2 cents”.

Cetan Dube, IPSoft CEO

Tyson on the other hand concludes that:

“We’re talking about machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines”.

So, what’s your take? How do you identify? Are you a consumer, or a worker?

Article originally published on Medium

The post Just another Cyber Monday: Amazing Amazon and the best deal ever appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Holo: The evolution of cloud computing

Holo Value Proposition

Holo is launching a peer-to-peer app hosting marketplace.

Today, application developers usually pay Amazon or some other big corporation to serve their app or website to visitors.

Holo enables anyone to compete with Amazon for this business by offering the spare computing capacity on their own laptop, desktop or other computer. When their computer hosts an application, the developer pays them instead of Amazon.

Just like Airbnb enables people to rent spare bedrooms to help pay their mortgage, Holo enables people to rent their computer’s spare storage and processing power to help pay for their internet access, or even their computer itself.

Holo does to spare computing capacity what Airbnb did for spare bedrooms

And there is actually a LOT of spare capacity out there. In fact, globally, the idle storage and processing power sitting unused in our laptops and desktops dwarfs even the infrastructure of the largest cloud computing company.

Holo will do to that enormous spare computing capacity what Airbnb did to spare bedrooms.

Except, with Holo, you won’t find yourself cleaning sheets all the time. Here, your computer does the work and you reap the reward.

Application hosting is the cash cow of the third most valuable company on earth

And this isn’t a small market. For instance, Amazon is the third most valuable company on the planet, and though their app hosting division, AWS, accounts for just 10% of their revenues, it generates more profit than the entire rest of the company… combined. In other words, AWS is the cash cow of Amazon. And they are just one of several gigantic companies in the space. So… yes, hosting is a big business — and getting bigger.

Why you should Participate

If you are trying to decide whether you want to participate in this ecosystem, we can make it even more blunt:

Holo might do to the cash cow of the third largest company on the planet, what Uber did to Taxis.

Except, unlike Uber, with Holo, 99% of the money goes straight to the people whose machines are doing the work. That’s right. In exchange for orchestrating all of this, we take just a 1% cut.

Sound familiar? It might. People have dreamed of this for years. It was even the plot of an HBO show last season. But two new innovations from Holo are enabling us to, as Forbes recently put it, “turn internet fiction into reality.” Those two innovations are Holochain and Holo Fuel.

Holochain

First, Holochain is a new way of running truly peer-to-peer applications that makes it so that my computer doesn’t necessarily have to “store” all of the content in an application in order to be able to serve that content. Instead, my machine can quickly retrieve anything I need right when I need it. It’s “just in time” content delivery. And when my computer then serves that content to a visitor, I get paid.

Folks around the globe have been building apps on Holochain Alpha (“the adventurer” release) since October. Holochain Beta is coming soon.

Holochain is live now and apps are actively being built and run on it. Holochain gives Holo a competitive advantage by giving it a collaborative advantage. And thanks to the care with which we designed Holochain, the World Economic Forum called Holochain one “of the most integral technology projects” in the blockchain space, pointing out that we “aren’t just putting lipstick on clones of existing projects” but have actually gone “back to the drawing board and created mission-driven roles for coders, entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, regulators and policymakers.” We’ve taken some of the most widely used technologies of the last two decades and combined them in a novel way. Holochain combines the efficient peer-to-peer data storage model (DHT) that bitTorrent uses with the tamper resistant logs (Hash Chains) that blockchains use and the agent centric approach (each agent has their own perspective and signs their own actions) that Git uses. We think of Holochain as an evolution of blockchain, because it solves so many of the problems that have plagued blockchain over the past decade, including scale, speed, cost, adaptability and composability.

One thing to note is that unlike Holo, Holochain itself is not a platform. It is a pattern. Like HTML. We are giving it away to the world for free. It is open source. It does not require web servers. Or miners. Or cryptocurrency. Every user of a particular app, runs that app, showing up as both user and host. Holo is making use of this “holochain” pattern and is reaping the efficiency and resilience benefits that result.

Holo fuel

Holo fuel. It isn’t actually fuel. It’s for fueling hosting.

Second, Holo fuel is a new crypto-accounting system that enables us to process transactions in parallel, rather than in sequence. That means that Holo can handle millions or billions of simultaneous transactions. Moreover, because Holo fuel is so efficient, we can process transactions for even very small amounts such as a payment of a penny. And though this might look foreign if you are only familiar with blockchain “token” based types of cryptocurrencies, it isn’t exactly untested. We’re applying a centuries old double-entry accounting system called Mutual Credit. And now we’re getting to use Holochain and cryptography to distribute, secure and extend the capabilities of this tried and true accounting system.

Holo Currency Pricing

We’ve been compared by others to Ethereum, the blockchain based computing network that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars at present. So we did some benchmark testing. We built and tested several applications so we could see how costly it was to perform computation on Ethereum vs. Holo.

The result: depending on the app, Holo is somewhere between one-hundred-thousand and one-million times more efficient than Ethereum. For more details, check out our benchmarking walk through.

So when we decided to pre-sell Hosting services on Holo with an Initial Community Offering, we wanted to accomplish two things:

First, put our money where our mouth is. Second, create a margin gap to enable a two-sided marketplace to emerge.

PUTTING OUR MONEY WHERE OUR MOUTH IS

We have drawn a line in the sand and are offering to host applications WITH OUR OWN COMPUTERS for 10,000 times cheaper than Ethereum.

This makes visceral just how much more elegant the design of Holo and Holochain are relative to Ethereum and Blockchain.

If computing services were cars, for the same amount of money that it would take to buy a Remote Control car on Ethereum, you could buy a real car on Holo. And that car would be a Lamborghini. That is what a 10,000 times price difference looks like ($40 vs $400,000).

CREATING A TWO-SIDED MARKET

Second, It also makes visible that we are UNDER-PROMISING what our network can deliver. We wanted to ensure that there was room for those who step up to participate in Holo as developers and hosts, to get rewarded for doing so. The gap between our “100,000 x” or “1,000,000 x” better benchmark performances and our “10,000 x” offer leaves room for Hosts to enter the market and underbid our price.

We expect that a competitive market will form, and because it will cost hosts five or fifteen or fifty times less than our price point to provide hosting, other hosts will be able to underbid us and win hosting contracts.

And when those hosts price their offerings competitively in order to attract more business, holders of Holo fuel will likely be able get two, or ten or twenty times as much computing power as even the price at which we were offering to provide it ourselves.

In other words, that same amount of Holo fuel that would have bought you an RC car on Ethereum, starts to deliver two, or five or ten Lamborghini’s worth of value (not that we’d spend our money stockpiling Lambo’s, but you get the point).

That creates a win-win-win. A win for hosts. A win for developers. A win for us.

Of course, it won’t exactly be a win for everybody.

Ethereum for instance. It probably won’t be a win for them. If a competitor enters the market and starts offering similar services for, let’s say 50,000 times cheaper than you are able to provide, what do you think will happen to demand for their services. And what would a drop in demand for ETH services do to their currency?

How HOT is related to Holo fuel

Because Holo isn’t live yet (our ICO is focused on funding the software development for it), we needed to raise funds through an existing, and established channel. Ethereum ERC20 tokens have been the standard way of running an ICO for the last year or two. The Holo Token or HOT is an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain and will be redeemable for Holo fuel once Holo goes live. This redemption will happen at a conversion rate of 1 HOT = 1 unit of Holo fuel (HOLO). Holders of HOT will need to redeem HOT for HOLO within 6 months of the launch of the network. You can think of it like a coupon that expires if you don’t redeem it in time.

Again, Holo fuel is the utility credit currency that application owners can use to pay for hosting services on the Holo network.

We estimate that the Holo network will go live sometime in Q3 of this year. In other words, we are aiming to launch Holo in July, August or September.

When a host provides hosting services for an app, that app’s owner pays for that hosting using Holo fuel. So if you have an application and want it hosted (served to non-peer visitors) via Holo, you need to buy Holo fuel from somebody so you can pay your hosts. The Initial Community Offering we are currently running is a pre-sale of the currency that will be used in our system. The purchase and redemption of ERC20 HoloTokens is how people are acquiring Holo fuel. After the close of the pre-sale, people will buy Holo fuel from others that have purchased it from us, earned it themselves through hosting etc. For more details, see our Green Paper. People with Holo will be able to use it themselves, or sell it to others who want hosting services, or, if they earned it through hosting, redeem it with the Holo organization in exchange for other currencies.

To be clear, Holochain applications do not need to use Holo when they are just interacting amongst peers (others who are also running the same application).

But not everyone is going to install Holochain on day one.

So how do you reach “the masses” when the masses have not yet installed the new empowering peer-to-peer apps of the future? You let them interact with those apps through a pattern they are familiar with: opening a browser and typing in a URL.

Holo hosts serve out websites to anyone with a browser, thus creating a bridge back to the “old” internet that everyone, even my grandparents are used to by now. (To be fair, Jerry, Jacqueline, George, and Algreta are fairly savvy when it comes to the internet, but I digress).

When a host creates this sort of bridge by hosting on behalf of an application, the app owner pays them, just like that app owner today might pay Amazon Web Services to host their app.

Some describe this hosting process as being similar to the mining that happens in Blockchain. However, whereas “mining” is an arms race to see who can waste the most electricity doing useless work in hopes of winning a lottery, hosting consists of serving applications or webpages on behalf of customers that are willing to pay for that hosting service. It is way more useful, way more cost effective and vastly more environmentally friendly. For instance, the HoloPorts that we have been making available through our top trending IndieGoGo campaign, use about as much electricity as a lightbulb.

Matt’s Snarky Takeaway

For those that don’t want to take the time to understand this evolution of cloud computing, no hard feelings. Seriously. We played with remote control cars when we were kids too. They were fun.

But you might want to ask yourself, “if these folks are on to something, and they do manage to cut the cost of distributed computing by 20,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 times…

do I really still want to be HODLing ETH?”

More info:

Holo Website

ICO Purchasing and Stats

Holochain Website

Holochain Code

More Technical Overview of Holo

Technical Walkthrough of Holochain

The post Holo: The evolution of cloud computing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Following the links from Slashdot I discovered this interview to the arkOS developer and even more projects in the same space that I didn’t know: buddycloud, Personal Clouds and unhosted.

After a look at those projects and a few email and tweets exchanges, including the explicit question “why not just help the FreedomBox Foundation, instead”, I came to two conclusions.

First, I’m happy that all these projects exist. On one hand, they prove very well my point that now is THE moment for personal clouds. On the other hand, they make my own work much easier and more likely to succeed (if it does start, see below) because they are already doing parts of it.

In the second place, just because of what I read about those projects, I still believe that there is space and need for the percloud as a separate effort. Before explaining why, let’s deal with the FreedomBox question (which was already a FAQ anyway…):

Q: why not just help the FreedomBox Foundation, instead?

• because @FreedomBoxFndn itself seems uninterested, and that’s PERFECTLY fine, of course!!
• because it’s a bit like asking “why don’t help Debian to become Ubuntu, instead of forking it?”
• I have no problem to help whoever is working towards certain goals. That’s why I explicitly said since the beginning that all my work would be “Free as in Freedom” code and documentation. However, at this point my only feasible way to help is to get paid to do the percloud “phase 1” myself

What about those other projects?

arkOS is “a Linux-based operating system… designed to run on a Raspberry Pi – a super-low-cost single board computer – and ultimately will let users, even of the non-technical variety, run from within their homes email, social networking, storage and other services”. It also seems a very flexible, general purpose environment, not a locked-down (=much simpler to use) one. Buddycloud is (emphasis mine) “a set of tools, open source software and protocols to help you build a completely new kind of social network.” Unhosted is about “serverless”, “client-side”, or “static” web apps. “Personal Clouds” is, if I understand correctly, a great, complete ecosystem of web apps, (tools to enforce) user-controlled Terms of Service agreements, network services etc…

The percloud, instead…

The percloud is just another GNU/Linux distribution, and this is a good thing. It will certainly be possible to run it also on a Raspberry Pi, or any other computer hosted at home, but I do not want to tie it to any specific hardware device. I want to build one single blob of software that can run on everything from data centers to home computers, with the smallest possible set of external constraints or dependences.

ICT experts will tell you that only a cloud running on computers you physically control can provide the greatest possible privacy, or that stuff like buddycloud or “Personal Clouds” could become much more complete and scalable than the percloud. Let me say one thing: they would all be right!

In my opinion, however, a really portable, software-only, relatively “quick and dirty” percloud as I am proposing shoud still be done and widely adopted for (at least) these reasons:

1. If somebody is sleeping in a burning house, you don’t wait until another house, at least as good as that one, is ready: you wake them up and tell them to get out NOW, to take shelter in whatever refuge you can set up in a hurry. PRISM and friends prove that we should really start to deploy realistic countermeasure soon. We can’t wait until greater but complex platforms or, even worse, actual alternative Internets like this are ready.

2: It is certainly not done on purpose, but ANY version of “running your cloud on some hardware you own and keep at home” is limited to minorities. We can celebrate Raspberry Pi for being “so cheap” (terribly relative term, don’t you think?) all day, but the reality is that only people with affordable and reliable electricity and flat rate broadband and reasonably high confidence that their home hardware wouldn’t be stolen or sequestrated could use arkOs as proposed. And that’s not even the biggest issue, because…

3: in my opinion the real, or at least the most urgent problem, is social and psychological, not technical. While the real solutions to PRISM-like issues are not technical, we can’t get there unless a lot of average Internet users are willing/prepared/able to get there. We need awareness and confidence much more than “platforms”.

Today, most average Internet users can’t see at all how replacing with something open the corporate walled gardens in which they currently live could ever be within their reach. Or why they should want it in the first place. I want to prove to how many of those users as possible, as soon as possible, that they can live online outside those walls. Why should they care if their first “refuge” may not be everybody’s ultimate, perfect digital home, since they could leave it whenever they wish for something better, without losing their data?

Let average Internet users get something that is really easy to use and, in many cases, perfectly adequate as-is for all their needs and skills. Do that, and they will all become both able and, often, willing to move to other, more complete solutions when they (both the solutions and the users…) are ready. But tell the same people that they have to either buy/configure/use extra hardware, or that they have to enter more than a handful of configuration parameters and they’ll NEVER get started.

This is why the percloud, by design, won’t be some ultra-flexible environment able to do whatever cloud computing you may want. It will, instead, be the simplest possible replacement for the main cloud activities that the majority of cloud users needs, with as little as possible initial configuration.

Final note for software hackers:

Software hackers who already run their own servers won’t need a percloud, but they should still recommend it to all their non-hackers friends. It would be the most realistic way to make sure that all email and other content they exchange with those friends does not end up on some centralized server that makes centralized, large scale surveillance much easier.

Of course, nothing of this will happen…

(not from me, at least) if you don’t whatever you can to fund phase 1 of the percloud. Thanks for your support!

The post The real problem that my p2p/personal cloud wants to solve, and why it’s still necessary appeared first on P2P Foundation.